We believe providing high-quality early care and education requires more than beautiful, safe environments rich with possibility.
Kimberlee Belcher-Badal, PhD , Executive Director, NWRA
High-quality care and education rely heavily on the professional who is essential to the child, family, and community they care for.
Therefore, the preparation, well-being, language, culture, wages, and benefits of that professional must be considered as valuable and integral to quality as the environment and curriculum themselves.
Our goal is to be the central hub connecting data reflecting the realities and needs of the Early Care & Education and Out-of-School-time Workforce to policymakers, investors, researchers, and change agents working to support them.
Our Theory of Change
We believe high-quality care and education require more than beautiful environments filled with interesting activities because people are at the core of the delivery system for exceptional early learning experiences. People who care for children, the early learning workforce, are the focus of our efforts. At the NWRA, we strive for a day when all children can access high-impact early learning opportunities to grow optimally. In order to do this, we must first reach all members of the early learning workforce with the preparation, compensation, and representation that contributes to ideal learning.
To accomplish this vision, we work to strengthen the Early Childhood (EC) Professional Development System’s vehicle for delivery, professional development registries. EC professional registries have grown to reach over 1.5 million members of the field in 2023. Registries provide over two dozen functions related to employment, workforce preparation/qualifications, licensing, and support. A by-product of those workforce support services, is that registries also hold data about the registered workforce, making them the central data collection repository with verified information on the workforce at the individual level. For this reason, registries are uniquely situated to equip policymakers, advocates, researchers, and funders with data that informs decision making, increases awareness, strengthens accountability measures, and helps prioritize initiatives responsive to the demonstrated needs of the workforce.
Our promise is to:
- ensure all members of the child care workforce receive critical information, recognized preparation, and timely updates, regardless of setting, role, or funding stream
- strengthen workforce engagement, support, recognition, and retention efforts
- increase access to well-prepared, adequately compensated care professionals for all children
- enhance workforce data quality to ensure workforce visibility, data saturation, and improve reporting
- develop access points to data summaries and connections to information and stories collected by and with the workforce
Who benefits from our work?
- Early Learning & Out-of-School-Time Professionals and anyone who navigates professional development systems in an attempt to provide or improve direct care to children
- State Professional Development Systems as we guide alignment, standards, and best practices for our 46 state members
- Workforce Registry Members, for whom we are the central organizing hub of information exchange, recognition in quality efforts, and advocates for continuous improvement
- National Partners, as we are the central-most access point to and from the registries and the workforce they represent.
- Data Consumers, such as policymakers, researchers, and early childhood advocates or change agents who rely on current data and information to guide their work, budgets, and decisions points.
- The public, Children & Families, as we collectively strengthen the early learning workforce, we indirectly and unilaterally increase access to and quality in care and education.
What we see as possible
Walt Disney once said, “When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably.” In our part of the world, at the intersection of workforce support and workforce data, our unrestrained belief is that by weaving the early learning system together it can learn more about itself from itself, to improve itself.
In our vision of what is possible we see:
A workforce professional development system that reflects all people caring for children, inclusive of all the roles and all the settings of early learning care and education, further we value recognizing the inherent wisdom born from both experience and hard-earned training and education, highlighting the personal development necessary to be a well-prepared professional.
A robust Emergency Broadcast System for this industry, ensuring we reach all people caring for children with critical information, delivered in timely ways, including resources to support their role and efforts.
A future where disaggregated data (based on setting, role, location codes, or ages of children cared for) is utilized to recruit, retain, and better respond to the unique needs of workforce members.
A live national workforce dataset:
- Informed by all states and territories
- With public access points to analyze, elevate, and apply data
- Includes both Qualitative and Quantitative elements
- Is responsive to what the field needs to know
- Enables an annual workforce census report
Integrated Data Infrastructure & Design:
- Promotes de-identified data sharing across the system
- Makes data access possible to cross-community stakeholders
- Improves data cleaning, so roll-ups are light and accurate
- Embeds cycles for continuous improvement in data integrity
A truly dynamic, bi-directional information network elevating voices from the field where place-based learning and research are pulled forward from field experiences that are aggregated and analyzed to inform policy, theory, and preparation.
Registries serve as the central hub to the spokes in our field.
In Meg Wheatley’s own words, we serve to create a healthier system, by connecting it to more of itself.
“Living systems contain their own solutions. When they are suffering in any way-from divisive relationships, from lack of information, from declining performance-the solution is always to bring the system together so that it can learn more about itself from itself. Somewhere in the system, there are people who have already figured out how to resolve this problem. They are already practicing what others think is impossible. Or they possess information which, if known more widely, would help many others. Or as a particular group that has been negatively labeled or stereotyped, they are far more capable than anyone knows.
To make a system healthier, we need simply to connect it to more of itself. This means meeting together with those we have excluded or avoided, those we never dreamed were part of our system of shared interest. Most often, people deep inside a school building don’t realize how many others-parents, community employers, public officials feel connected to them. When those who have been excluded to the periphery get to meet with those inside the system, it is always a wonderful surprise to everyone to see how much they share in common and how many of them want the same things.”
-Meg Wheatley, Living Systems, 1999
Our Programs
Training Transcript Alignment & Recognition
The NWRA partners with a number of national organizations to support training approval and inclusion. One specific example of this is our partnership with the CDA Council for Professional Recognition. By aligning training transcript elements, we are creating the framework for increased nationwide portability and reciprocity of training across states. The CDA Council's acceptance of recognized Registry Training Transcripts is a tangible example of PD system allies working to support increased data accuracy, decreased administrative burden on the workforce, and expediting processing of credential renewals and applications.
Emergency Broadcast Service
Using technology and relationships, the NWRA facilitates a vibrant network for bi-directional information exchange. We work to support peer-to-peer learning, mentor opportunities, and push critical updates to and from the field (via registry infrastructure that directly touches providers). This includes moving information from the workforce through the registry to inform national reports like the CARES reports.
Belonging, Workforce Perspectives, & Human Centered Design
In 2020, the NWRA board voted to create a new committee dedicated to applying a Human-Centered Design lens to our internal and external operations, programs, and policies. This sub-committee represent a public commitment by the NWRA to hold Belonging central to our values. The work coming out of this committee is driven by our desire to remove barriers to access, lighten system created barriers to inclusion, and elevate the needs of those who are adversely affected by our policies and actions.
